The Recording Industry Association of America went back to the courts at the end of last week to issue another 717 lawsuits against music fans suspected of illegally sharing music via the internet. As usual they were 'John Doe' lawsuits - the labels only know the IP addresses of the alleged file sharers, and will look to seek their actual identities from their internet service providers once they have proven their case for making the copyright violation accusations to the courts. The **Motion
Picture Association of America**, meanwhile, confirmed it was about to launch its second wave of lawsuits against people suspected of illegally sharing movies over the internet.
Both the RIAA and MPAA are also busy preparing their case to persuade the US Supreme Court that P2P companies like Grokster are themselves guilty of copyright violation - if the entertainment companies could get the P2P networks closed down there would be less need to target hundreds of P2P users with individual lawsuits. Their drive to secure that change is likely to be aided by research from web tracking firm BigChampagne who this weekend revealed that over 13 billion tracks were available for download via
P2P networks in 2004, a 28% increase on 2003, showing that, despite the high profile anti-download lawsuits, P2P usage continues to rise (although some say the fact some music companies are putting fake tracks online to spoof P2P users may have contributed to that considerable rise).